Thursday, August 8, 2013

Ever since the Arcade Fire popped off there have been a lot of bands straining to achieve the kind of majestic-but-humble, emotionally cathartic transcendental vibe that gets your music placed in Spike Jonze-ish indie movies and Levi's commercials, i.e., the indie equivalent of a gold record. On "Magnetic Love," LA's Raw Geronimo gets there with a minimum of visible effort by simply making a neat pile of references to girl groups and 50s prom slow jams and infusing them with a spirit that's half hippie psychedelic and half 70s art punk, and then letting front woman Laena Geronimo (the daughter of a Romanian singer-songwriter and Devo drummer Alan Myers) do her thing on top of it. After the jump you can see Geronimo and her boy-girl crew—including, crucially, twice as many drummers as any other instrument—rip it up live in an Echo Park studio.